The blockchain ecosystem is losing developers across the board, while artificial intelligence projects dominate the growth of GitHub, the world’s largest software code hosting and collaboration platform.
According to data from analytics platform Artemis, weekly crypto commits to repositories (releasing new code) have fallen by about 75% since the beginning of 2025, from about 850,000 to 210,000, while active developers have dropped by 56% to about 4,600.
Repositories track where developers write code, build tools, and launch new projects, and they provide one of the clearest signals of where software innovation is happening.
This contraction stands in stark contrast to the broader software ecosystem. According to GitHub’s Octoverse report, GitHub will add approximately 36 million developers in 2025 alone, bringing its global developer count to more than 180 million, and the number of developers across all platforms will increase by approximately 25% year-on-year.
Much of that growth is flowing into artificial intelligence. GitHub currently hosts more than 4.3 million AI-related repositories.
The number of repositories importing large-scale language model software development kits has surged approximately 178% in the past year to more than 1.1 million, while generative AI projects now attract more than 1 million contributors per month.
These numbers suggest that developers are reallocating their time to AI infrastructure rather than blockchain.
Repositories using Jupyter Notebooks, commonly used for machine learning experiments, grew by about 75%. The Dockerfile repository used to deploy AI applications has grown by approximately 120%. TypeScript is the programming language that powers much of the modern web and many AI tools. After gaining more than 1 million contributors in one year, it replaced Python and JavaScript as the most commonly used language on GitHub.
Across the cryptocurrency space, the decline has been broad but uneven.
According to Artemis, the number of weekly active developers on Ethereum fell 34% in three months to 2,811. Solana cut funding by 40% to 942 developers. Base, a Layer 2 incubated by Coinbase, is one of the fastest growing ecosystems in 2024, with the number of developers decreasing by 52% to 378.
New chains that attracted speculative interest during last year’s bull market are currently among the worst performers. Aptos lost about 60% of its developers, BNB Chain’s commitments dropped by 85%, and Celo dropped by 52%.
The only category still growing in size is wallet infrastructure, with the number of weekly active developers increasing by about 6% to 308.
Nonetheless, the data suggests that cryptocurrencies may be consolidating rather than collapsing.
Electric Capital’s annual developer report shows that the number of monthly active developers in the industry peaked in 2022 at about 31,000, before falling to about 23,600 in 2024, and is estimated to decline further to about 18,000 by mid-2025.
The composition of surplus labor is also changing. Developers with more than two years of service grew by about 27% year-on-year and currently contribute about 70%. Exodus has been concentrated among part-time contributors and newcomers with less than 12 months of experience, a group that has declined 58% in one tracking period.
Cryptocurrency developments have historically followed market cycles, and activity could rebound if another bull market lures builders back.
But previous downturns gave displaced developers fewer options. By 2025, generative AI represents a rapidly expanding frontier with deep venture capital and immediate commercial demand, raising the question whether this cycle’s brain drain will be harder to reverse.